June 25, 2018

Let Them Eat, Well, Whatever Is On The Menu

The latest sign of political divide: Shaming and shunning public officials

Oh, geez - you mean Democrats who vote to fund Planned Parenthood are getting shouted down in the streets? Not exactly...

Anger and division in American politics are creating a rising phenomenon: the public shaming and shunning of political figures while they are going about their private lives.

Few laws expressly prohibit a business from refusing service to a customer because of political views. Civil rights lawyers said that while there have been many cases in recent history involving establishments barring black people, women or members of the LGBT community, shunning people for their political ideology or affiliation has been relatively uncommon.

Until now. And in a time of intense political division, social media is magnifying the confrontations.

The suspense mounts! Oh, spoiler - the WaPo editors discourage this behavior in a separate piece:

Let the Trump team eat in peace

OVER THE WEEKEND there was a fair bit of argument about the decision by a small restaurant in Lexington, Va., not to serve dinner to President Trump’s press secretary. It wasn’t the first time recently that strong political feelings have spilled into what used to be considered the private sphere. We understand the strength of the feelings, but we don’t think the spilling is a healthy development.

Darn. I think it is one more behavior for the "This Is How We Get More Trump" file and since progressives gotta progress I am sure this will continue.

And not to wax nostalgic for the calm and good-will of the Watergate era but this NPR story of a flamboyant chef grappling with whether to serve Nixon's chief of staff is well worth the read.

Comments

Want a real eye-opener: read the Gramm/Ekelund piece from today’s WSJ about the effects of the Democrats’ income equality efforts (virtually leveling the income of those who don’t work much and those who work very hard in the working and middle classes). They guess that this had a big part in the switch of millions of voters from Obama to Trump, as those voters realized that the classic American formula of working hard to get ahead was being ended by progressive policies that stalled growth and encouraged idleness. The numbers are startling.

"How Income Equality Helped Trump
Working Americans sense that taxes and transfers now leave them little better off than those who work less.

By Phil Gramm and Robert B. Ekelund Jr. June 24, 2018 1:47 p.m. ET

Frenzied rhetoric about income inequality was a larger theme in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign than in any previous American election. When the ballots were counted, however, not only did income inequality fail to move voters, but a massive shift in voting preference among lower-middle and middle-income Americans led to the election of the wealthiest president since George Washington. Now, startling new data on government spending and taxes suggests a novel explanation for this voter shift: It was a backlash against rising income equality among the bottom 60% of American household earners.

The new analysis was published in April by the Cato Institute’s John F. Early, a former assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it provides the most comprehensive accounting to date of how taxes and government payments affect income distribution in the U.S. His study includes the roughly $1 trillion of annual government spending not currently counted in the U.S. Census Bureau’s income-distribution tables. That includes Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit, and 85 other federal payments and services, along with similar state and local income supplements. The study also subtracts federal, state and local taxes from individuals’ measured income, an adjustment not contained in the census data.

The most surprising finding is the astonishing degree of equality among the bottom 60% of American earners, generated in part by the explosion of social-welfare spending and the economic and wage stagnation during the Obama era. Hardworking middle-income and lower-middle-income families must have recognized that their efforts left them little better off than the growing number of recipients of government transfers. The perceived injustice of this equality helped drive the political shift among blue-collar workers, many of whom supported the pro-growth candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016 despite having voted for Mr. Obama in the two previous presidential elections.

The bottom quintile earned 2.2% of all earned income in 2013, but after adjusting for taxes and transfer payments, its share of spendable income rose to 12.9%—six times its proportion of earnings. The second quintile’s share more than doubled, rising from 7% of earned income to 13.9% of spendable income. For the third quintile, middle-income Americans, the increase was much smaller, from 12.6% to 15.4%.

Not surprisingly, high earners lost a considerable share of their earnings after taxes and transfers are taken into account. The fourth quintile’s share fell from 20.5% to 18.6%, while the top quintile dropped from 57.7% of earnings to 39.3% of consumable income. In other words, the top quintile’s share of earnings was 26 times that of the bottom quintile, but after taxes and transfer payments its share of spendable income was only three times as much.

Even more startling is the near equality among the bottom three quintiles. The bottom quintile, which earned only 2.2% of all earned income, had virtually the same share of spendable income as the second quintile, lower-middle-income Americans. This equality is despite the fact that lower-middle-income workers earned more than three times the share of income and worked 21/2 times as much, measured by comparing each group’s number of full-time workers relative to its working-age population. Middle-income workers earned almost six times the share of income and worked almost four times as much compared with the bottom quintile, but they enjoyed only about 20% more spendable income.

And even these numbers understate the huge difference in work effort. Compared with the bottom quintile, the lower-middle-income quintile had almost four times as many working-age families whose members worked two or more jobs, and the middle-income quintile had more than seven times as many families with members working two or more jobs.

The politics of envy based on income inequality has always been a hard sell in the U.S. Few Americans resent Bill Gates, whose innovations made him megarich but also made the rest of us better off. Who resents Warren Buffett, who became one of the richest men in the world by raising the return on Americans’ savings and retirement accounts? George Mitchell, the Texas oilman who invented fracking, made oil and gas cheaper for the whole world—and he received only a tiny share of the wealth he created in so doing.

Americans tend to believe that people become rich because they are smart and work hard, but it is easy to see how a middle-income husband and wife who both work could resent that people who don’t work are about as well off as they are. It might be fair that Bill Gates is rich, but it seems unjust that 60% of Americans have virtually the same standard of living despite dramatic differences in the effort they exert and the income they generate.

The harder people worked without getting ahead, the more reason they had to feel disrespected and alienated in November 2016. President Obama and Hillary Clinton mocked their values. The tax and regulatory policies of the Obama era caused economic growth and middle-income wages to stagnate. But what must have added insult to these injuries was the increasingly obvious fact that the boom in government benefits and the decline of economic growth had all but eliminated the rewards that middle-income Americans traditionally received for working hard. The explosion of social spending, and the dependency it generated, no doubt benefited the Obama campaign in 2012. But that same spending helped create the wagon-puller backlash that defeated Mrs. Clinton in the next election."

Mr. Gramm is a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Mr. Ekelund is a professor emeritus in economics at Auburn University. This article is adapted from a forthcoming book, “Freedom and Inequality.” Mike Solon and John Early contributed to this article.

When I remarked on my hometown's Opinions page on Facebook that if it's not OK to not bake a gay wedding cake, then it's not OK to not serve someone based on their political affiliation.

A user with a rainbow flag icon chimed in with "she is not a protected class", so I pointed out that I didn't think I was old enough to remember when restaurants could choose to serve only members of a protected class, but I guess I was wrong.

boris--I think the insidious idea is that people and groups pf people, be they a city or a workplace or a school are systems that can be controlled via the political process dictating what they can know, what will be habits of mind, and what the legal process will mandate they will do. That is a Bipartisan project and it encompasses all levels of government. It is also the reason most think tanks, however they bill themselves, were created.

Anyone viewed as in the way of such plans for steering, like a tea party affiliated group, gets targeted for harrasssment. We have a rebellion because plenty of people are invested in this government steered society.

One of the things I have experienced in person but not really written about is the peculiar looks politicians will get from time to time when they realize I don't have a talking points understanding of what is really being sought via education. It becomes very clear just how many people who claim to be conservative are quite aware of the steering function at a neural level of learning standards and how it makes being a politician these days both more lucrative and powerful than ever before.

Anyone know why a vehicle I used to see rarely--rolls royce and bentleys, is now appearing about once a week as I drive around town.

I don't know if it's because so many movies get filmed in atl now or show-off, but I swear I have seen 6 to 8 in just the last month. All relatively new and different cars. Some coupes and others sedans.

Operation: Shake the Ground!, a coalition press release states, is expected to bring together 40 liberal organizations, including Sousaphones Against Hate, a big brass-playing ensemble of lefties marching against oppression with the motto “Resist and Protest.”

Back home from my morning gardening for my sister. Really not hard, mostly deadheading and watering, with an occasional weed.

She now has a little scooter thing she can kneel on with her broken-ankle leg and push with her good leg. She says it is MUCH better than trying to use crutches. She also said it was much cheaper to buy it on line than to rent it at CVS.

The week just passed has changed the calculations. The images from the border, and the White House’s fatheaded trolling of the situation, seems to have shaken up everyone in Washington to the point at which alliances are more fluid than they have been since January of 2017. There seems little doubt that the Republicans in the House of Representatives are riven with ideological chaos, struck numb by the basic conundrum of modern conservatism: When your whole political identity is defined by the proposition that government is not the solution, but, rather, the problem, you don’t know how to operate it when fortune and gerrymandering hand you the wheel.

. The entire separation of children from their families appears to be genocide under The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which the U.S. has signed (1948) and ratified (1988):

Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

We have not yet seen evidence of child deaths, but section (b) is likely and (e) of Article 2 is definite — the children are now in custody of the United States government and disbursed to others’ care..

SBW, your freshly-minted revision is why I’ve not been shy about the word Sedition.

We may not be able to find any other specific conventional crime with whch to charge these people, but Sedition covers it nicely. Particularly as the nonsense and attempts at coverup persist to this very day.

I’m convinced there was a reason HRC used the phrase “swing from nooses”.

Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan on Monday announced legislation to abolish the federal agency. “Unfortunately, President Trump and his team of white nationalists, including Stephen Miller, have so misused ICE that the agency can no longer accomplish its goals effectively,” Pocan claimed.

(He did not mention that a majority of U.S. Border Patrol agents are Hispanic.)

I like that idea of abolishing the name ICE and replacing it with FBI. Joking aside, I really don't see how the FBI can recover from this. Their credibility is shot and how the hell anyone can trust them after this is beyond me.

or how is it that the USG has the contents of his conversations of some meetings he had in the Seychelles-well after the election-and at that point I don't think Prince had an official role in the transition, and aside from fundraising, didn't have much of a role in the campaign.

Nails together all of the fake news of the past week with its culmination at the Red Hen: "it's not working and they're filled with rage. they had 8 years to create a one party state and its being unwound. Trump is unwiding it before their very eyes."

sounds about right.

Rush is fearful someone is going to be killed at the current rate of escalation.

of course, when it happens it will be a "lone wolf" profiled as a nut case nobody knows.

there are plenty of those types mouth-breathing their way through life here in Zerkley.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!

KK-murray was the Dem lead sponsor on 3 pieces of seminal legislation that essentially restructured the way governance works in the US that are widely touted as Bipartisan--2014 wioa--workforce innovation and opportunity act that restructured dramatically economic development in all the states with required coc input at the state and regional levels with Republican Johhny Isakson of Ga as the cosponsor.

The new federal ed legislation passed in December 2015 with implementation required starting this fall with Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

Then the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission with Paul Ryan. One Dem senator doesn't accidentally get to be the major sponsor of all those.

I have seen rumblings in the last two or three days that all food servers (who are presumed to be younger and thus reliably leftist) should merely kick out perceived conservatives from their restaurants, but instead should POISON them, with a smile. And if not out-and-out poison, they should put snot, spit, semen or other disgusting things in the food served to conservatives.

It started as conversation online between SJWs about whether booting out Sarah Huckabee Saunders was a wise thing to do, when a better better course of action would have been to simply poison her. She was foolishly putting her health and well-being in the hands of people who hated her, so why not take advantage of the moment?

But then the idea metastacized -- why not do the same thing to ALL obvious-looking non-SJWs? Since food servers have access to these people innards, and thus their health, why not make it standard policy at all SJW restaurants to poison/contaminate all conservative customers?

Much agreement that this was a great idea.

Now, this meme is floating around the Left today. And even if there won't ever be an "official announcement" to start the mass poisoning, I think a number of SJWs in the food service industry have already decided to do it on their own, having bee inspired.

So, basically, this is now the end of normal society in America. Having seen all these discussions, I now am VERY wary of ever eating in most Bay Area restaurants again.
Posted by: zombie at June 25, 2018 01:15 PM (c+2jX)

Mueller's investigating a crime that wasn't committed but for one important reason--- keep the suggestion of wrongdoing by Trump alive until the House could be turned in November via slow drip (e.g. "he's moving in this direction; he got the records and phone of this Trump associate...blah blah blah.)

the protocol governing who Mueller reports to and why works in their favor. the feignt-and-screen play seems to be all that they have.... unless one believes that Sen. Mark "Loose Lips" Warner is not fulla caviar.

James Woods
@RealJamesWoods
Now that a United States Congresswoman has called for harassment against Republicans and the inevitable violence that will come of it, I urge all of you to a) get armed, and b) vote. Your life literally depends on it.
2:15 AM · Jun 25, 2018

James D: no argument from me that the Left has tried and fallen short. the people whom i hear mentioning the fear that somebody will die are people who are quite familiar with the less than lethal efforts. -Kev

“In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”

I photographed a local mexican restaurant and their kitchen made me shudder it was so..not clean..

Have photographed Patty Murray a few times. Wish I could go into better explanation for my reasoning on this but she is controlled by some liberal outfit. She is just not that smart (borrowing from MarkO) to figure out the legislation she puts out there. A reporter I was with was asking her Murray questions and the responses were robotic plus she is guarded by union thugs.

I haven't had the chance to follow up on my question about Chris Christie vetoing the child marraiage bill in NJ. I did ask people on Reddit why the new gov wanted to rip girls. away from their husbands.

To put a finer point on it: President Trump and his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have used official powers to whip up a harassment campaign against a restaurant in Lexington, VA after its owner, at the behest of her immigrant and LGBT employees, declined to serve Sanders. Amid the controversy, the establishment has largely taken the opportunity to lecture the owner about decorum.

Different people landed on this view for different reasons, some better than others, but all of them seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the stakes of the act, as if it were a symbol of a deterioration in discourse between liberals and conservatives, rather than an act of moral suasion that, if widely adopted, would impel Republican leaders to change the detestable ways they treat immigrants, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable people.

At the end of the Bush administration, a contingent of liberals advocated, similarly, that certain officials should essentially be shunned. These officials dragged the country into a war that cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives on false pretenses, and instituted an illegal torture regime at CIA black sites around the globe. If they were simply reabsorbed into elite life, the argument when, the next cadre of potential torturers would feel undeterred. Making them anathema wouldn’t merely serve retributive purposes, wouldn’t be uncivil behavior for incivility’s sake, but would create an important incentive for future unscrupulous leaders to avoid inhumane temptations..

Good Morning! Just listened to the first 12 minutes if that video of the 2 Actors reading the texts of Page and Strzok. Boy was that effeective. And who had any idea that after listening for only 12 minutes I would come away hating her guts worse than I hate him? Man, is she repulsive or what. Boy do those 2 deserve each other. And their praise of Comey as a genius is a beautiful window into the the colossal ifnorance of the both of them.

BTW, Am at my fav cafe in Paris so if Maryrose is reading, come on over to the Cathedral. I've got an open chair next to me and I'm buying! Viva la France.

What is the name of the convicted felon, married to some Chicago pol, who met in Obama's Office something like 48 times, and was caught by James O'Keefe on hidden video bragging about hiring thugs to go after Conservatives?

Asked by Mitchell if he supported the comments by Waters, Booker replied he subscribed to an ideal of "radical love."

"Yes, you should protest. Yes, you should confront evil and injustice," he said. "But do it in the ways that Martin Luther King did … Recognizing the dignity of even those who you oppose, even those who are trying to destroy you."

Right on cue, Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post editorial page, which has no compunction about publishing the words of torture-enthusiast Marc Thiessen, blurted out the most embarrassing single paragraph written about the events at the Red Hen. To wit:

We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?.

Sanders is uniquely complicit in this. Her job requires providing cover for the president’s most egregious lies, undermining a vital part of public discourse — the very idea of fair and open public discourse about the truth. If refusing service to Sanders puts the spotlight on this feature, it might not harm America’s political civility; in fact, it might even improve it.

What “civility” in politics actually means
Incivility in the Trump era isn’t about rude tweets. It’s about lies.

To understand what Sanders’s defenders are getting wrong about the dinner incident, let’s get straight on the difference between “incivility” in politics and simple rudeness..